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Finding Up to Date Teacher Resources on the Web
You might have to have the nine lives of a cat to gather all the teacher resources from libraries and bookstores and read all those teacher resources. That is, if you were on your own, had no useful materials from grad school and teacher networking, and if you had no internet access ever. But this reverse hypothetical is not anywhere near happening right now, thanks to the www. One of the obvious boons of the worldwide web is the facility of accessing quality teacher resources. Usually designed, written, and submitted by fellow instructors, these teacher resources offer fresh approaches, lend themselves to professional development, and (again obviously) contribute to the enhancement of classroom (or virtual classroom) learning of concepts, strategies, methodologies, and skills.
As an instructor of English and as an online course developer, I have found many valuable teacher resources for linguistic, literary, and rhetorical disciplines in particular and for education and teaching in general. Some of these I would like to share with you, maybe saving you the time I spent collecting online teacher resources, or maybe just introducing you to a site, a database, or a teaching strategy or idea that you had yet to discover, but hopefully not creating a redundancy—by listing a site you know well. So rest at ease knowing you do not have to keep up with the cat and his or her many lives to glean some more materials for your classroom.
For starters, online teacher communities offer premium teacher resources. Such gatherings as Pro-teacher Community; Teachers.net; and Tolerance.org feature lesson exchanges for K-3, 4-8, Math, Science, Technology, and gifted students; theme studies materials (for teaching tolerance, for example); live chat; job and classifieds boards; web exclusives; grant information; and submission/publication information and guidelines (where applicable).
The teacher resources I found most helpful for developing online courses were those set up as databases and offering interactive lesson plans and materials. These premier sites are, among the many, Teacher Oz’s Kingdom of History, a WWII database developed by Tracy Osborn; Web English Teacher, ambitiously compiled by the remarkable Carla Beard; ESL Resources at OWL (Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab, offering handouts, resources, and exercises); a sometimes hard to load links site (keep refreshing) called Just for Teachers, wherein Sheboygan Falls teacher Dawn Hogue offers advice, syllabi, book lists, and links for AP English teachers; and ReadWriteThink--lesson plans, web resources, student materials, and academic standards.
There are, of course, hundreds more fantastic teacher resources—handouts, exchanges, and databases. I hope, however, these few will give you a fresh approach and will help you and yours to sustain, develop, and evolve as teachers and learners in this our wonderful new millennium.
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